


keep hold

by owlinaminor



Series: keep hold, don’t let go [1]
Category: 1917 (Movie 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Fix-It, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mutual Pining, Tom Blake Lives
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-08
Updated: 2020-02-08
Packaged: 2021-02-27 18:27:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22620202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/owlinaminor/pseuds/owlinaminor
Summary: Blake is asleep in the medical tent when Will gets there.
Relationships: Tom Blake/William Schofield
Series: keep hold, don’t let go [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1691131
Comments: 42
Kudos: 664
Collections: author's favorites (betsy owlinaminor)





	keep hold

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote a sad fic, so then i had to write a fix-it fic. that's just the rules.
> 
> inspired partially by the way [this poster](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/1223082504413962241) makes it look like schofield is perpetually following blake, and partially by the regina spektor song [dance anthem of the 80's.](https://genius.com/Regina-spektor-dance-anthem-of-the-80s-lyrics)
> 
> shout-out to laura for a) proofreading this and b) humoring me as i have talked about nothing but this movie for the past two weeks.

> _They want to watch, to watch each other, sleep, sleep, sleep._

The moment Will Schofield reaches the 2nd Devons, he wants to leave.

They insist on dressing his wounds, dousing his head in cold water and wrapping his hand in gauze. He has dinner in the mess tent—they have a whole tent here, not just campfires behind the trenches. Blake’s brother waves Will over but he shakes his head and finds an empty corner, sits there shaking. He sleeps—well, he lies down.

He lies down in the shadow of a fire near where he first came out of the river, or at least he thinks it’s near where he came out of the river. All the trees look the same to him. He wonders if Blake would know—are these oaks or beeches or what, do they flower, do they bear fruit in spring—and he sees Blake, another reflection on the river, another shadow running between the branches only he’s cracking twigs underfoot, he’s yelling something stupid, he’s going to get caught.

Will has to go back. It’s all wrong, isn’t it: he was supposed to be the smart one, the cautious one, but here he is lacing his boots back up at the first light of dawn and tiptoeing out of camp before breakfast.

Smart doesn’t mean shit out here—it’s stupid that wins the medals. Throw your body into the line of fire enough times and they’ll assign it meaning when you get hit. Blake got hit, and he could be bleeding out in a farmhouse somewhere between here and the 8th. All the gauze Will had plus a ripped-up shirt stuffed in his chest to dam up the flood. Will sees him, always sees him, hanging behind his eyelids, his blood painting his jacket in a terrible artificial sunset, saying _my brother, my brother, you have to find my brother._

He said it, so Will did it. Faced Germans and cannons and trees, swam and screamed and fought his own side, but he did it. He saw Blake’s brother. Even shook his hand.

_I was sent here with him. He was still alive when I left him, I had to move on but I hope, I hope—_

They have—had— _have_ the same eyes. Tom Blake and Joe Blake. Both wide-eyed, blue-eyed, like tidepools reflecting the ocean, like ragged chivalry pulled in from another time.

Will sees those eyes that morning as he runs. He doesn’t have to run—was strongly instructed not to, in fact, by the doctor who cleaned him up—but his feet start moving and that’s that. Legs pounding, lungs burning. This is just how his body moves now. And Blake is ahead of him, always ahead of him, always ahead.

Down the river, through Ecoust, past the bloody farmhouse. Blake isn’t there—Will knows this for certain, knows it because he checks all the rooms and the barn and the pasture and the orchard. He tries to push down the hope that rises in his chest like a bluebird catching the wind. There are birds in the sky over the farmhouse, he can hear them calling. He doesn’t think there were birds yesterday. Or if there were, he wasn’t listening.

And the cherry trees are still here, of course. Dead branches wave in the breeze, sweet blossoms hang in the air. Will needs to move, he needs to _run,_ but he thinks Blake would forgive a few minutes to sit against one of the felled trunks. The biscuits in his pocket are waterlogged, maybe, but they’re a better lunch than air.

Will tears a piece off and tosses it to the birds circling over the barn, then he pushes to his feet and moves on.

Blake is asleep in the medical tent when Will gets there.

It’s incredible—like a mirage in the fucking desert, like a branch reaching into the middle of a river—Blake’s cheeks still red, lips parted, curls matted and pushed off his face, chest rising and falling. Chest rising and falling. He’s only one body among hundreds, but Will has to sit down just from the sight.

He collapses in a heap next to the cot, rifle clattering to the floor. His limbs ache like he just climbed a mountain, but the sunset is warm behind him, the earth is cool beneath him. The earth still turns.

Will watches Blake’s chest rise and fall, and finally, finally, he can breathe, too.

“Hey, Schofield! Schofield! Sco! Will!”

Will shudders awake and straightens, rolls his shoulders. He’s on the ground at the lock house—he’s on the riverbank—he’s trapped in the ash of a German bunker—he needs to run—

Except that, no. He doesn’t need to run. It’s only Blake. Soft blue eyes, familiar, and a hand reaching out to wave.

God. Only Blake. That’s like saying _only the entire British army_ or _only every flower in the country of France._

“Hey,” Blake says. “Fuck, it’s annoying I can’t shake you awake from up here. Thought you’d come all the way back just to die on me.”

Will stares, because what else is he supposed to do? There’s—this boy, his eyes, his cheeks, breathing and talking close enough to touch. Okay, that’s one: Will touches Blake, because he has to—Blake’s hand is calloused, caked in dirt, warm as the sun.

“Hey,” Blake says again. “You alright?”

Will doesn’t have a word for what he is. He is the twilight pouring blue-purple over the fields, maybe, or the grass swaying slowly beneath. But mostly he is—

“Tired,” he says. “I’ve never been so tired in my whole goddamned life.”

Blake laughs at that—opens, like it’s the easiest thing in the world. The laugh pushes into a cough, his hands go to his chest—bandages, tightly wound—and he glares at Will as he tugs at one, then lies back.

“Are _you_ alright?” Will asks.

“Oh, sure. Just blood loss and a broken rib or two. Doc says I’ll be up and running suicide missions again by next week.”

He’s trying to make this one of his stories, Will can tell. Rehearsing for the next campfire: _so me and Sco here were sent on this insane message mission, like we’re paper boys only whole route is crawling with Huns._ But there’s an edge under it, a sharpness to his voice.

“I did it,” Will says. He shifts closer to the cot, make sure Blake can see his eyes. “I delivered the message.”

Blake closes his eyes for a moment, then looks back. “I know you did,” he says. “Otherwise you wouldn’t’ve come back.”

They stay there for a moment, just looking, and Will wishes for light, any light, so he could see better.

“And I—fuck.” He clears his throat and tries again. “I saw your brother. He does look just like you.”

“Only taller, right? And handsomer?”

Will looks. Blake is nineteen, he knows, they celebrated his birthday together with a bottle of whiskey filched off one of the captains a few months back. Blake’s still growing into his face, his sharp nose and baby cheeks lodged at odds, his lips full and always half-open like he’s ready to say something stupid at any moment.

But is his brother more handsome?

“No,” Will says. “I don’t think so.”

Blake looks back at him for a long moment—his face is all shadows in the dark and Will wants to see his eyes, wants to see, wants to see.

“Look,” Blake says. The word is sharp, like an order, and Will wants to reply, _I’m already looking, I’m always looking._ “Look, don’t sleep on the ground, alright? Or against a tree, or in one of the tents? I’ve got space here, right. I’ve got space.”

He doesn’t have space. But Will goes anyway: stands, nearly loses his balance all over again, drops all the packs and ammunition and concealed knives, unbuttons his jacket and steps out of his boots, and lies down there on the bed beside Blake. Blake is warm, always warm, could light a cannon in the dead of winter warm, and when he curls against Will’s back something quiets in Will, some pounding that he’s been carrying for the past two days stilled finally, like they only need to stay this close and the war will end and everyone will go home.

Will falls, almost immediately, into a dreamless sleep.

Will wakes sometime past twilight, a faint ache in his head and pressure in his bladder.

Well, at least one of those is manageable. Will twists to his side and goes to sit up, but there’s an arm across his chest. There’s Blake. Blake: radiating body heat, his face pressed into the flimsy folded blanket that serves as a pillow, hands curled into fists.

Will could move his arm. Blake has won wrestling matches between then, sure, but he’s asleep and injured—but _alive,_ a less tactical part of Will is quick to remind him, _alive._ If Will reached up and pressed his fingers to Blake’s neck, just beneath his chin, he’d feel a pulse.

He stays very still, instead—stays there looking, studying the curves of Blake’s face in the faint moonlight coming through the tent flap. He’s built like a renaissance painting, Blake is, or like a drawing of a soldier in a novel. Young, innocent, dreaming of glory and doomed to tragedy—it’s written clean across his unlined brow. But this boy is no tragedy, Will thinks. He’s not. Will won’t let it happen.

Will lies there quietly until the pressure in his bladder becomes overwhelming, then he lifts Blake’s arm slowly, slowly, and rolls out from under it. Still, standing beside the cot, he hesitates—misses the warmth already—leans down, there in the quiet moonlight, and presses his lips to Blake’s forehead.

_I’ll keep him safe, I will, I will._

When Will gets back, Blake is turned on his side, propped up on one elbow.

“Sco,” he says, and his whisper is loud as a gunshot in the darkness. “Fuck. Thought maybe I’d dreamed you.”

Will shakes his head. “Just had to piss,” he whispers back.

Blake sags and lies back. “Right. ’Course.”

Will takes a few steps closer, then hovers at the edge of the cot. Does he return? Does he have the right?

Blake answers this question—as he answers all questions—by moving, grabbing Will’s hand and tugging him back down. He adjusts them into the same position as before, Will on his side and Blake curled around him, his face pressed in Will’s hair.

Only this time Blake leans back: enough to touch the bruise now rising on the back of Will’s head. His fingers send a shudder all the way down Will’s spine, but if Blake notices, he doesn’t say anything.

“What happened?” he asks, voice as gentle as his fingers.

“Got shot at by a German,” Will says. “Fell backwards down a flight of stairs. Bastard made me lose five hours, I think—I was out cold.”

Blake keeps tracing the bruise, as though committing it to memory, then starts carding through Will’s hair. He’s messing it up or he’s combing the dust out or both, and Will is paralyzed, just at how soft this is, at another person’s hands on him to soothe instead of strangle.

“Tell me what happened,” Blake says.

“I—I did—did I?” There is some neural passage connecting Will’s brain and his mouth that is not operating as normal.

“No, I mean—about everything.” Blake is tracing down the back of Will’s neck now, smoothing the short hairs there. “You pulled me into the farmhouse, right, you bandaged me up and told me you’d send help, and then what?”

Will has never been good at talking. He can’t weave a story like Blake can, can’t string together sentences in an easy rhythm and leave room for laughter. But Blake wants to know, and so he does his best to talk. He starts with meeting Captain Smith a mile out from the farmhouse, convincing him to send two men back to help Blake, then keeps going. The river, the soldier on the landing, Ecoust.

“The baby reminded me of Abigail,” Will says, when he gets to the fire-lit room behind the wall. Blake has stopped running hands through his hair but he’s still close, one of his hands resting on Will’s elbow. Holding Will steady as he talks. “My sister’s younger daughter. I mean—when she was younger, anyway, she’s two years old now. But she used to be tiny like that, and screaming all the time.”

And Will realizes with a start that he hasn’t told anyone in the company about his sister, not even Blake. But now that the words have started, it’s impossible to hold them in. Is this what Blake feels like all the time?

“My sister, Liza,” he says. “She’s a year younger than me, and we were always really close. Her husband worked in the coal mines, died in an accident—that was three years ago now, God—so I’ve been helping support her. Or I did—before. I keep their pictures—”

“In a tobacco tin,” Blake says. “I know.”

“You do?”

“I’ve seen you look at it before we go into a fight.”

Will sits up at that, sits up and stares down at Blake, lying with his head pillowed on one arm.

“What?” Blake says. “I can be perceptive.”

Will looks at him a moment longer, then lies back down. There isn’t space for both of them on the cot, especially like this, on their backs with their elbows out, but there’s something comforting about it. Being pressed up against someone else after hours of running across emptiness. Makes Will feel more real.

He’s about to start talking again when Blake asks, so quiet Will nearly misses it—

“So, no wife, then?”

“Me?”

Blake nods—Will feels it push into the mattress.

“Yeah,” Will says. “No wife.”

There must be some weight to this, to the way the silence sharpens and Blake shifts, so that there’s a space, maybe enough for a feather, on the bed between them. There must be something. But either Will’s head injury is still fucking with him or he’s not as smart as he thinks he is, because he can’t figure it out.

So, he goes back to talking. He goes through Ecoust, the running, the river. Doesn’t mention the cherry blossoms in the water, because if he did, he’d have to say who they reminded him of. He talks about climbing out, though—cold and slippery on the bank like a fish trying to walk, stumbling into the forest and onto the 2nd.

“What song was it?” Blake asks when he describes the music.

“I don’t know,” Will says. They’ve drifted back together by now: both on their backs still, but their legs are tangled and their shoulders touch. Blake is warm, so fucking warm, maybe he’s got a fever or something but even so Will wants to stay there, wants to embrace it, to build a home for that warmth inside his chest so that it can climb inside and live in him forever.

“I don’t know,” he says again. “But it was beautiful. Like—I could finally sit down for a minute and just breathe. And then I realized they were the 2nd and it was just a lot more running.”

“Yeah,” Blake says, “they should excuse you from training exercises for the rest of the bloody war.”

Will smiles just picturing the extra naptime. “They should. It was so much, man. Running to the front, then running through the trenches, then the trench was too crowded so running on _top_ of the bloody thing—”

“Wait, running _where?”_

Will is almost embarrassed to talk about it, but Blake is looking at him all bright-eyed and breathless in the moonlight, so he explains. “I went up on the bank and ran along the trench. Perpendicular to the way everyone else was running out. And there were shells comin’ in, and I kept getting knocked over—oh, and I’d lost my gun in the river. It was the stupidest thing I’ve ever done, I think, and I’m friends with _you.”_

Blake turns his head and stares. His mouth is hanging open a little, and Will wants to—to put a finger to those stupid-round lips, just to see what they’d feel like closed around him.

“You,” Blake says finally. “You, Lance Corporal Sense And Caution Schofield, Not Marching Till I Know The Whole Route Schofield, We Should Wait For Dark Schofield. You got out and ran along the trench in an active war zone.”

“Yeah, if you want to dramatize it like that.”

Eye contact is too much. Will has to duck his head and look at where their legs are tangled, instead.

“They better give you another bloody medal for that, Sco,” Blake says, “or I’m gonna personally fight every single officer in the British armed forces.”

Will smiles—something ignites in his chest, stupid-soft and sweet as the cherry blossoms floating on the river.

“Will,” he says.

“What?”

“Call me Will.”

Will looks, and Blake is looking back at him. He’s so close, so close, and they’re already touching but Will wants to be closer, wants to pull the blanket up and stay here until the war ends.

“Okay,” Blake says. “If you call me Tom.”

Oh. It’s logical—action and reaction—but so immense, this feeling that comes with it. Will practices forming the syllables: click of his tongue, round _O_ with his lips, ends with a hum. _Tom._

“Your brother called you Tom,” Will says, stupidly.

Blake— _Tom—_ replies quickly, almost curt. “I don’t care about my brother.” And then—and, oh, Will can practically feel his face heating up from here: “I mean, I do. But of course he does, he’s my brother. I want you to. To call me Tom.”

Will lies there for a moment, just smiling. Talking to Tom sometimes is like sitting in the sun, and he wants to bask.

Then, he says, “Hello, Tom.” He lifts one hand for a handshake, never mind that their elbows are practically interlocked. “I’m Will. Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you, too, Will.” Tom shakes, and his hand is warm, warm, warm.

And maybe they keep holding on, after that, even as they twist and press close and fall back asleep. Maybe they keep holding on. So what if they do.

Will blinks awake to sunlight.

The world is bathed in it, all shimmering gold, and it takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust: there’s the edge of the med tent, the canvas door wide open, and there are several other cots, all full, and there’s a tall man in khaki stood in front of him.

“Good morning, Lance Corporal Blake,” the man in khaki says. “And friend of Lance Corporal Blake, I presume. These beds are supposed to be for the wounded, you know.”

“Sorry, Doc.” And here’s Blake—fuck, here’s _Tom—_ on the cot, his legs tangled up with Will’s. Will turns to look at him and it’s almost too much: like staring directly at the sun. Tom always wakes up faster, jumps up and offers Will his hand, and he’s wide awake now—eyes bright and mouth moving.

“… s’injured, though, Doc,” Tom is saying. “He got shot at and fell down a flight of stairs just two nights ago.”

The doctor takes a step closer and peers in at Will. “Have you openly bled from an injury in the past twenty-four hours?” he asks.

Twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours ago, Will was waking up with the 2nd and starting the trip back.

“I don’t think so,” he says.

“Then get out of my tent, I need to treat my actual patients.”

Will nods dutifully, swings his legs out and goes to stand. Fuck, it’s cold out here. Tom must be some kind of independently powered heating system, like a locomotive engine or a blazing star, to make the space under the blankets so warm.

Will’s shoes and gear are at the foot of the bed, right where he left them. Will is halfway through lacing up one boot when he hears—

“Wait!”

Will looks up. The doctor is at the side of the bed now, unwrapping a clean roll of bandages, but Tom’s pushed himself up and waves one arm frantically.

“Can he stay here?” he asks. “And then can he help me go to mess?”

The doctor looks from Tom, to Will, then back to Tom. Will tries to make his face appear as polite and deferential as possible.

“Alright,” the doctor says. “But be quiet, this is a delicate process.”

And so Will stays as the doctor changes Tom’s bandage. It _is_ a delicate process, and a time-consuming one: first unwrapping, then ointment to stave off infection, then rewrapping with clean gauze. Will tries to watch closely, to learn the technique so that he could do it himself if he had to, but he can’t help watching Tom’s face instead.

Tom grits his teeth as his flayed-open skin meets open air, and his eyes squeeze shut like he’s trying not to cry. Will took Sophie, Liza’s other daughter, to get stitches once after she fell off her bike, and she looked like this too, face red and tight, but it’s different seeing it on Tom—it’s more private, somehow. Like Will is watching not only Tom’s wound stripped open but something else, too, something deeper.

Tom wears his heart outside his uniform, like a bloody idiot. It’s no surprise he got hurt. The surprise, the mistake, is that Will wasn’t watching for it closely enough. He wants to march back two days ago and shoot the pilot ten times over, not just shoot him but strangle him, get his bare hands around the bastard’s throat and make him scream. Will doesn’t hate Germans, not categorically, but he hates the image of that man in his memory. Hates that he takes up space.

“Hey.”

Will looks up—the doctor is gone and Tom is sitting up, the bandages on his chest white as cherry-blossom snow.

“You alright?” Tom says. “I was joking about your head trauma earlier, but maybe—”

“I’m fine.” Will gets to his feet. “What about you, how is…” And there’s no easy thing to call it, is there, the gaping chest wound, the personal reminder of how kindness in war is deadly.

“Fine,” Tom says. “But that took forever, I’m starving. Help me get my jacket on, I want to see what’s for breakfast.”

He says it like that: _help me,_ not _can you_ or _would you please._ Like he knows Will would run to the ends of the earth and back, if Tom asked.

But then—he does know, doesn’t he? Will did just that, run to the ends of the earth and back, he did it just yesterday.

Will helps Tom get dressed: shirt first, then jacket. New clothes, they must be, his old uniform was caked in blood. Tom sits very still as Will tugs his arms through one material then the next, only wincing when he stretches his left arm out too far. He’s warm, still, even after the bandage-changing in the open air, and Will narrowly avoids asking how the hell that’s even possible, is Tom some kind of heat-giving god?

Tom pulls on his boots, finally, and they go to mess, Tom’s arm around Will’s shoulders. Turns out they’ve missed breakfast, but one of the mess officers gives them bread and stew from the lunch rations and they hobble to the field out back to eat.

It’s nice to move slowly, Will thinks. After all that running. Tom is a weight at his side, heavier than a gun but lighter than a cannon, and he keeps calling out to the soldiers they pass, waving and grinning like, _see, not dead, gonna get that medal after all._

Tom is a weight at his side: like gravity, pulling Will back to earth.

The field is empty, mostly, except for a few men tossing a rugby ball back and forth. The poppies sway in the breeze, the trees whisper to each other. Will helps Tom brace himself against an old oak and then sits beside him, shifts until the thick bark fits the curve of his back.

As they eat, Tom quizzes Will on the 2nd—what’s their camp like, what do they serve for dinner, are their officers as big pricks as ours. Will explains as much as he can remember between bites. The stew tastes salty and not much else but it’s hot, hotter than the food is at proper meal hours, and the bread is less stale than usual. He thinks it is, at least. Maybe he’s projecting—the bright blue sky and ruddy pink of Tom’s cheeks painting everything in a more flattering light.

But if he is projecting, Will thinks, he’d rather stay in this world, this lit-with-gold world, than go back to the real one.

He falls asleep in the sunlight, after eating. Sunlight’s always been kind to him—something about the warmth, the way it lingers in the bark of a tree, makes him feel protected. They used to make armor from tree bark, didn’t they? Before metal was invented? Maybe that’s why. Trees are built for the long haul, for standing and swearing allegiance.

Will doesn’t dream, or if he does, it’s a haze of gold. Reflections dancing across his eyelids like across placid water, everything soft and sweet.

Tom is watching him when he wakes up.

Tom: backlit by sun at first, a glossy halo of a man. He leans closer and his features are filled in beneath the shadow of his crown—and God, God, eyes and cheeks and lips, this indentation at the corner of his smile that might be a dimple, it’s too much, it’s all too much, Will wishes the earth would open and swallow him just to relieve him of the urge to touch.

“Hey,” Tom says. “Good nap?”

“Uh,” Will says. He gives his brain a moment to catch up. Then: “Good as it’ll ever be, I guess.”

Tom nods, shifts around to lie down next to him, on his back in the grass.

“Can I ask you something?”

_Anything._

“Sure.”

“What was it like—when you were buried under all that dirt, in the German trench?”

Will thinks back. It feels like lifetimes ago, now—the rickety beds in the dark, and the stacks of canned food, and the motherfucking bastard rats. He remembers watching the rat drag something across the floor, his whole brain lit up with panic like he was struck by lightning, and then—nothing.

“Wasn’t like anything, really,” he tells Tom. “I couldn’t move, I couldn’t think. Just screamed.”

“Yeah, you were screaming bloody loud,” Tom says. “I thought the world was ending.”

His tone is light, like a joke, like one of his stories, only there’s a sharpness to it—Tom brings his arms up and folds them over his face, blocking out the sun.

Will looks for a moment, then lies down, too. He opts for lying on his stomach—the grass tickles his face—and reaches out his right arm to put a hand on Tom’s shoulder. A tiny weight, don’t want to put pressure on Tom’s wound, but something solid. Like sending up a flare.

“The world wasn’t ending, though,” Will says. “You pulled me up, you made me walk out with you.”

Tom lowers his hands and turns to look at Will—and he’s so goddamn young, especially like this. Framed by the grass, circles under his eyes and sunburn on his cheeks but no lines on his brow, not yet. He looks at Will and there’s a hint of red in his eyes, maybe, maybe something wet on his cheek.

Will wants to reach out and wipe it off, he wants to reach out and smooth it all away, wants to take the whole bloody war, he’d take Tom clean back to northern England if he could. If he weren’t so bloody selfish. He wants—

He keeps his hand on Tom’s shoulder. Steady even as Tom starts to shake.

“Tell me,” Tom says. “Tell me you’re here. You’re not a ghost.”

“I’m here,” Will echoes. “I’m here. I’m not a ghost.”

“Now that sounds like something a ghost would say, you bastard.”

Will—startled into a laugh despite himself—rolls onto his back in turn, then reaches out and flicks Tom’s cheek. Light enough to keep him steady but heavy enough to sting. To be real.

“Thanks,” Tom says. “You bastard.”

Tom stays there on his back another minute, then pushes up on his elbows—and he’s looking, he’s looking, he’s looking at Will. The sunlight stretches and wraps around them, and it feels like an embrace, it feels almost like going home.

That night, Tom falls asleep in the middle of a story.

It’s something about boot camp—two friends of his got into a ridiculous argument about who was supposed to close their window—but he trails off before the punchline, syllables slurring together like honey poured into tea.

Tom’s lying there on his back, arms up behind his head, mouth open in the tail end of a yawn, and Will is honored just to watch this. Fuck medals, fuck glory, he’ll take Tom Blake in the moonlight. Tom Blake opened, Tom Blake with his guard down enough to slip asleep in a sentence, brow unfurrowed between one word and the next.

Fuck medals, fuck armies, fuck the whole wide expanse of France and how it’s been carved up. Will wants cherry blossoms, and quiet on the river. He wants to follow Tom, and keep following. He wants to walk, and not run.

“I was following you, you know,” Will says. He keeps his voice low, like a hum, like a wind in the trees. He reaches one hand up—his right hand, the hand that has fired rifles and strangled Huns and delivered a message worth sixteen hundred and two lives—and rests his palm on Tom’s cheek. Easy, easy. He’s just sitting down to lean against the tree: if he’s quiet and polite, the tree won’t notice.

“I was following you,” he says. “Through the farmland, through Ecoust, along the river. Through the trenches and all the way back. That’s how I did it, all of it. Whenever I closed my eyes, I saw you running, and it was like you were yelling at me to keep up.”

Tom’s cheek is warm, warm, soft against Will’s hand.

“You said, when we were in the Huns’ trenches, when the bloody ceiling was collapsing around us and I couldn’t see to run—you said, keep hold of me. And I’m keeping hold, Tom. I’m not letting go.”

Tom’s eyes open.

Will has just long enough to think _oh shit_ before he’s pulled, pulled down brought close gravity itself upturned and Tom is kissing him. Tom is kissing him. Lips still soft somehow beneath the dirt and mouth warm and wet, fuck, he tastes like apples, how the _fuck_ does he taste like apples, they haven’t had fresh fruit for months.

Will flips onto his back when they have to break to breathe, just to stare up at the canvas ceiling and remember there is, in fact, still a world out there.

Tom only gives him a couple of exhales, though, before he turns, too—presses his torso up against Will’s, brackets Will’s head with his hands. Will wishes it were broad daylight suddenly just to _see_ him, the flush of his cheeks and the way his curls fall. Everything at new angles—everything all at once, he doesn’t know if he’s falling or rising.

“I’ll make them give you every medal, Will,” Tom says, breathless. “All the gold in England, and half of the gold in France.”

“But I don’t want all the gold in England,” Will says.

“Then what do you want?”

Will grins—that feeling in his chest is rising, rising, fit to burst open. “You know.”

And Tom grins back, because he does.

This is how they sleep, in the months that follow.

There is a tent, at the edge of camp. Or there is a cot, at the edge of the barracks. Or, when summer comes, there is a tree, a blanket of grass beneath it. Tom lies down first, and he pulls Will down beside him. Or Will collapses in an exhausted heap, and Tom curls around him. Or they fall together, and sleep later.

The logistics are unimportant. The constants, the conditions necessary for survival, are these: limbs entwined, shoulders pressed together. Will throws an arm around Tom’s shoulders, Tom presses his face to Will's hair. Their breathing steadies together, evens, and slows.

Tom is warm, warm, warm as the rising sun, and Will is warm, too.

**Author's Note:**

> im like, i keep dropping hints that will has a concussion. will has a concussion.
> 
> i am planning a sequel so uh... watch this space.
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor) / [tumblr](https://owlinaminor.tumblr.com/) / [let's go lesbians](https://twitter.com/owlinaminor/status/1224540109338484736)


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